Questo post contiene il contributo di Anthony Glavin nell’ambito del dibattito in doppia lingua – inglese e italiano – organizzato nello spazio di Letteratitudine chiamato BABELIT, dedicato all’incontro con autori non italiani. Di seguito, l’articolo di Anthony Glavin in lingua originale e la traduzione in lingua italiana di Valeria Lo Forte
IL VIAGGIO di ANTHONY GLAVIN
On the Road Again: Thoughts on the Creative Journey
by Anthony Glavin
‘The end is nothing, the road is all. In fact, the road and end are literally one.’ Death Comes to the Archbishop, Willa Cather
‘Lately it occurs to me what a long, strange trip it’s been’.
‘Truckin’ by The Grateful Dead
I’m not sure it’s possible for me to pinpoint the inception of something like a ‘creative journey’, but let’s say it begins on a Greyhound bus pulling out of its Boston depot on Tuesday, July 5, 1966. Being a Virgo, of course, I’d even noted the time—8:45 p.m.—on the first page of a soft-cover, thread-bound, reporter-style, notebook that served as a journal on that first, storied, road trip all those years ago. Proud possessor of a $99 Dollar/99 Day Bus Pass, I’ll spend the next ten weeks both bussing and hitch-hiking some 8,500 miles around the continental USA, along with a short trip north of the border into Canada, via ferry to the lovely town of Victoria, on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. I am nineteen, utterly clueless in most every way, but apparently adventurous, and adventures I’ll find aplenty.
The first page or two of that journal are given over to describing fellow bus passengers, “a small cowboy in violet shirt particularly obnoxious” and “a 25-year-old African-American, off to Chicago to start a new life”, together with a notation that ‘Ohio and Indiana are all fields, barns and big cloud-filled sky”. My first stop is a lakeside resort in Wisconsin, where I plan to spend the weekend visiting Clement, a university pal who has a summer job washing dishes there. However, I fall head over heels for Linda, a waitress at the resort, “auburn hair & fantastic laugh”, so signing on as a temporary bus boy, I clear tables for ten or twelve days, before I say goodbye to Clement and Linda both, and thumb a lift to the Greyhound bus station in Milwaukee. Pulling out my magic $99 Bus Pass, I then ride all the way to Billings Montana, where I hop off and hitch down to Yellowstone National Park, where I camp for a couple of nights, noting down a “rather large black bear passing within 12 feet of where I was unrolling my sleeping bag’.
I take note in my journal later that week of the majestic sunset—“dark purple clouds with a pink fringe” on the “golden mountains” at Lake Solitude in the Grand Tetons, whose 10,000-feet altitude makes me “feel high, 3 or 4 beers worth anyways”. In fact, the light and colour show moves me to tears, and I recognise the next year at university some of what I was feeling that evening upon encountering what the English poet Wordsworth wrote about the sense of “the sublime” that he and the other Romantic poets experienced upon first visiting the Alps.
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